Traditionally, integrated circuit design and fabrication have involved the efforts of a team of people in producing a finished part. Design, prototyping, testing and final productization have usually required more than one iteration, and the design task has been largely separated functionally and temporally, from the process of final documentation. Device data would typically be collected from various sources and transferred to an individual such as a technical writer, who would prepare a device datasheet. Among the sources of the data would be a designer, manually compiling a list of data.
The advent of programmable integrated circuits and computer-aided design (CAD) tools has reduced the number of individuals required to carry a concept from design to productization. The development of the integrated design environment (IDE) has made it possible for individual engineers to configure a programmable integrated circuit.
The IDE has made it feasible for a single designer to configure sophisticated integrated circuits with dozens of pins and many possible inputs and outputs. An example of such integrated circuits is the programmable microcontroller. A programmable microcontroller may include a microprocessor, memory, and digital and other programmable hardware resources. The number of pins and possible signals significantly increase the amount of information required to document the final product. Manual compilation of data by a designer is tedious and prone to error.
Although many tasks have been efficiently combined into current integrated design environments, the task of final documentation has not. Final layout and generation of a product datasheet still requires the transfer of data to an external capability, and manual compilation and editing, e.g., using a word processor and/or other document editor. This required data transfer increases the chance for error and the time required to produce a datasheet.